David Ayman Shamma
Yahoo! Research
Media, Community, and the Social Photograph

A decade ago we saw the birth of Flickr, a media website for social photosharing. Since then, social media websites have grown to encompass many types of photo, video, audio, and even hyper-link sharing. Many researchers have conducted work on these social-websites in general yet there still exists many opportunities to explore how people engage with media online, specifically multimedia, in social contexts. In this talk, I will highlight some new challenges for researchers studying social photography and present a few recent findings from my lab's investigation of Flickr which include geographic annotation of photographs and regions, community congregation online, and social engagement.

David Ayman Shamma (Yahoo! Research, USA) runs the HCI Research group at Yahoo Labs and is the Scientific Liaison to Flickr. His personal research investigates synchronous environments and connected experiences both online and in-the-world. Focusing on creative expression and sharing frameworks, he designs and prototypes systems for multimedia mediated communication, as well as, develops targeted methods and metrics for understanding how people communicate online in small environments and at web scale.